A Berlin man was fined €900 for farting twice while he was undergoing a routine police identity check in February 2016. He appealed the fine in court on Tuesday.
The defendant, named only as Christoph S., reportedly 'cut the cheese' twice in the vicinity of a female officer. Her squad leader took this as an insult to his officer's honor and slapped Christoph with a huge fine, which he received only in February this year.

Christoph was not silent, but deadly in his defense of the right to break wind.

“It is one thing if the leader of a police unit sees his colleague’s honour as being injured by a fart. But it is quite another if prosecutors and the judiciary agree - that is a failure of the state,” said Christoph's lawyer Daniel Werner at the appeal hearing, as cited by Berliner Zeitung.

The trial was reportedly gone like the wind, as the judge threw the case out within a matter of minutes.

Doctors are well aware of this problem, and yet, it persists. According to a new survey of 2,106 physicians conducted by researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, 20.6% of of medical care is unnecessary.

The survey is published in PLoS ONE.

The responding physicians were randomly selected from the American Medical Association master file. Just over half were primary care physicians and the rest were specialists. Four in ten of the specialists focused on general internal medicine. All of the doctors answered the question, "In your specialty, what...

Sea salt around the world has been contaminated by plastic pollution, adding to experts’ fears that microplastics are becoming ubiquitous in the environment and finding their way into the food chain via the salt in our diets.

Researchers believe the majority of the contamination comes from microfibresand single-use plastics such as water bottles, items that comprise the majority of plastic waste. Up to 12.7m tonnes of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, equivalent to dumping one garbage truck of plastic per minute into the world’s oceans, according to the United Nations.

“Not only are plastics pervasive in our society in terms of daily use, but they are pervasive in the environment,” said Sherri Mason, a professor at the State University of New York at...

Some dogs get free rein of their humans' bedroom. Some are banished for fear of causing a bad night's sleep. A new Mayo Clinic study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings this week says it's OK to let Mr. Fluffypants snooze with you, but there's a catch. Mr. Fluffypants needs his own bed.

The newest Mayo study tracked the sleep quality of 40 dog-owning participants with no sleep disorders over the course of five months. Both the human and dog participants wore accelerometers for seven nights of the study.

MODERN artificial intelligence is much feted. But its talents boil down to a superhuman ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data. Facebook has used this ability to produce maps of poor regions in unprecedented detail, with an AI system that has learned what human settlements look like from satellite pictures. Medical researchers have trained AI in smartphones to detect cancerous lesions; a Google system can make precise guesses about the year a photograph was taken, simply because it has seen more photos than a human could ever inspect, and has spotted patterns that no human could.

AI’s power to pick out patterns is now turning to more intimate matters. Research at Stanford University by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang has shown that machine vision can infer sexual orientation by analysing people’s faces. The researchers suggest the software does this by picking up on subtle differences in facial structure. With the right data sets, Dr Kosinski says, similar AI systems might be trained to spot other intimate traits, such as IQ or political views. Just because humans are unable to see the signs in faces does not mean that machines cannot do so.

The researchers’ program, details of which are soon to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, relied on 130,741 images of 36,630 men and 170,360 images of 38,593 women downloaded from a popular American dating website, which makes its profiles public....

Psychologists have long known that people tend to favor their own group over others, a social phenomenon known as ingroup bias. But new research provides evidence that atheists are motivated to buck this trend in an attempt to override the stereotype that they are immoral.

Psychology researchers from Ohio University found that Christians demonstrated an ingroup bias towards other Christians in an economic game but atheists did not have an ingroup bias towards other atheists. The study was published online July 10 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“The rise of the so-called ‘New Atheists’ about a decade ago coupled with the ongoing ‘culture wars’ between religious and secular groups in the United States has led atheists as a population to gain an unprecedented level of visibility in this country in recent years, even as their prevalence has only incrementally increased. This has sparked a particular interest in anti-atheist prejudice research in social psychology,” explained study author Colleen Cowgill, a PhD student.

“From this previous research, we know that the general population in America tends to stereotype atheists as being immoral and untrustworthy – a reputation that many atheists understandably find distressing. My primary interest was in how atheists themselves respond to these negative stereotypes.”

MIYAZAKI – A deadly tick got away Monday after being brought to a news conference held by the Miyazaki Prefectural Government to warn of a tick-borne disease, prompting the governor to apologize the next day.

Prefectural government officials conducted a search for the insect with the help of reporters present at the news conference, but failed to find it, and sprayed insecticide, officials said.

“We should have been more careful about safety management as the prefecture is in a position to alert its people,” Miyazaki Gov. Shunji Kono said at a regular news conference Tuesday.

The prefecture held the news conference in the press room after several of its residents came down with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or SFTS, which the tick carries.

The officials brought a live tick and a dead one for the media to photograph, but the live one disappeared when an official tried to pick it up with tweezers.

The officials and reporters looked for the missing tick in vain. The officials sprayed insecticide in the room and disinfected the room that night, they said.

The Ehime Prefectural Government announced last month that a farmer in his 60s in the city of Shikokuchuo died of Japanese spotted fever after being bitten by a tick.

Owning a dog and going on regular dog walks both have proven health benefits. But a small new study suggests that no matter how many times you hear that pounding the pavement with your pup is good exercise, that’s ultimately not what gets you (and your four-legged friend) up and moving.

According to research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, dog owners are motivated to walk their pets because it makes them happy—not for health or social reasons. Also up there on the list of reasons? They think it makes their dogs happy, too.

The study analyzed interviews and personal written reflections from 26 people about why, exactly, they walk their dogs. While many owners said they do it to benefit their pooch, the researchers say the importance of the owners’ happiness and well-being was also clear.

But that happiness depends on the owner believing that the dog is enjoying the walk, the researchers noted in their paper. Motivation to walk was decreased when owners had reason to doubt this notion—like when they felt their dog was misbehaving, “lazy,” or “too old” to walk regularly.

The study mainly suggests that dog owners keep doing what they’re doing, since they can still rack up the health benefits of...

LONDON — Chocolate giant Mars is promising to spend close to $1 billion over the next few years fighting climate change.

The $35 billion food giant behind brands like M&Ms, Skittles, and Twix on Wednesday launched its "Sustainability in a Generation" plan, aiming to reduce the carbon footprint of its business and supply chain by more than 60% by 2050.